


I Want to Hold you High

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Assault, Shock, Whump, lots of blood, psychic impotence, the effects of carrying someone else's burden, vicarious trauma, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2018-12-19 05:12:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11890743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: The Doctor shows up at Clara's flat with one foot in the afterlife and all he has left to give. Physical recovery is still, somehow, low on the priority list as it becomes clear that something else is very wrong, and Clara takes on what might be construed as too much for her to handle.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic in a while that I have spent longer than a day on. It's actually been like, edited and stuff. I spent two weeks just knocking it around in my head before I ever typed the first word.
> 
> Edit, Dec. 11 2017: I posted this in August, near the bottom of a pretty bad depression spiral. It took weeks because I couldn't focus, no matter how much I wanted to write. In early november, I started a new medication and the results have been life-changing. I actually lost part two to a hard drive failure, and *I rewrote it.* That never would have happened before. Since starting the meds, I have begun to unravel some real trauma I didn't know I was carrying. Don't worry, you'll see it. Or at least feel the effect it had on this story. All of this to say, sorry for ruining the magic here, but the first two parts of this fic are going to sound like they were written by two different people, and that's because in a way, they were. Cheers for staying with me here.

Clara was midway through an episode of Golden Girls when she heard the TARDIS materialize in the next room. She glanced reproachfully at her phone, but made no move to check it; it was a Monday, and an hour past her bedtime, and this sort of thing had been happening suspiciously often since Christmas. She wasn’t fully convinced he wasn’t mucking it up on purpose. A crash startled her from her thoughts, followed immediately by a thump. Clara snatched the remote and paused Doris in the middle of a snappy comeback, working up a good telling-off as she pulled her damp hair up into a ponytail and marched for the door. God forbid she ever forget why she’d started lounging around her own home fully clothed.

 

Clara pushed open the door of her bedroom. “Are you trying to—” She jammed her knee against the wood when the door met unexpected resistance. She cursed, peering at the floor through the gap of living room light to make out the cuff of a sleeve, or something that may have once been a sleeve but had since been sliced to ribbons. The familiar hand that protruded from it was caked in something dark, and it wasn’t moving.

 

“Doctor?” Worry replaced exasperation as she gently nudged the door again. The arm seized as a grunt of pain sounded from within. “Oh,” she said softly. Then, “Doctor, I have to come in. Can you move?” For a long moment, there was no response. Clara counted to ten and prepared herself to lever his unconscious body out of the way, and then she heard a pitiful groan and the faint shifting of his limbs. The door opened just enough to let her squeeze through.

 

The Doctor whimpered hoarsely as the lamp above him clicked on a moment later, both at the assault on his eyes and at the thought of Clara seeing him this way. He’d begged the TARDIS to take him somewhere safe, but shame burned in him at the thought of her piecing together everything that had happened—everything that had been done to him.

 

Between Coal Hill and frankly bizarre time travel scenarios, Clara Oswald prided herself on having become adept at stifling vocal reactions over the past few years. All of her practice rushed out of her in a gasp as she took in the sight before her: her Doctor, semi-conscious and broken on her bedroom floor, face bruised nearly beyond recognition and limbs twitching in vain to curl against the light— and, she suspected, her gaze. She took in the holes in his clothes, the blood on his collar and peeking above the waistband of his trousers and swallowed back a wave of nausea as she dropped to her knees to reach for his face with shaking fingers.

 

“Heya,” she whispered, and touched his cheek.

 

The Doctor flinched away and tried to raise an arm to shield himself—touch was bad. Touch meant pain. As though to prove his point, his body stiffened and immediately rebelled against the movement. He felt her smooth his hair, heard her murmuring to him as the aftershocks shook him for several more seconds until he went limp again, breathing hard through ruined lungs. He focused on trying to calm down, focused on the time before, when touch was good. Touch from Clara was good.

 

Clara swallowed thickly, her fears solidifying with every indication the Doctor gave of the trauma that had been laid across his body. “Doctor, it’s me.” She heard her voice crack on the last syllable and took a deep, shuddering breath to try again. He needed her, she thought, and he needed her in one strong piece. Just for now. She reached for his hand instead; it looked mostly undamaged and curled reflexively around her fingers when she touched it.  

 

“There you go,” she encouraged. And again: “It’s me.”

 

His eyes opened, and she watched helplessly as they tried to focus on her face and landed somewhere past her ear. His mouth moved, but she heard only a rasp.

 

She saw the bruising around his windpipe then, and shushed him gently. “Of course it’s Clara, don’t be daft. Where else would you be?”

 

She touched The Doctor’s face again and though he flinched, his eyes drifted shut and he leaned ever so slightly into her palm. He felt a stirring of hope somewhere beneath the pain. Maybe he wasn’t beyond saving after all.

 

“Okay,” Clara breathed. “Okay. Doctor, I need to get you sat up. You’re safe now, but I need to be able to see your injuries. Can you help me?”

 

The Doctor took stock of his level of agony and inhaled shakily before giving the barest of nods, steeling himself as she bent down and encircled his ribs as firmly as she dared. Over the sharp zigzag that lanced through his side and staggered across the darkness behind his eyelids, he felt a loose strand of her hair brush against his cheek and caught the scent of her shampoo. He gathered all of his willpower and focused on that point of contact. An anchor. His anchor.

 

Clara braced a knee and hauled him gently up until he was leaning against the TARDIS doors, head lolled to the side and useless arm resting against his thigh. His face had gone white under the dirt and blood, but his eyes struggled open and Clara breathed a silent thank you to whichever deities might be listening when they settled properly on her face, tight with silent suffering but clear.

 

“You did great.” She tried for a smile.

 

The Doctor had the fleeting thought that he must look worse than he realized. He wanted to apologize, but he was going to need another few minutes to rally the focus to try speaking again.

 

Clara rose to her feet, and his eyes followed her anxiously. She noticed—of course she noticed, his Clara—and she brushed his temple with a knuckle. “I’m going to get the scanner and some supplies from the TARDIS,” she reassured him. “I’ll be right back.”

 

He shut his eyes in acknowledgment and focused on breathing as he told himself it was over, the worst was over and Clara was here and he could smell her room over the blood and residual damp and her carpet was soft against the exposed patches of skin on his legs. His thighs…he dared to turn his internal senses to his ruined hips, but his mind bounced off of the attempt like a stone on water and he did not look to see where it hid.

 

Clara took the steps of the TARDIS two at a time and rounded the doorway into the med room with single-minded determination. She refused to break down as she piled in her arms the supplies the TARDIS had materialized on the desk just inside—guaze, several damp rags that were cool against her arms, a large tube of cream that she recognized well enough to know its multiple uses, a biostitch kit, and a small device that she did not recognize. She scooped up all of this and the scanner, sending a resolute thanks to the ship as she made her way quickly back out to her room.

 

The Doctor looked up at her wearily, gratefully, as she deposited the items on the floor and knelt so that she was straddling one of his outstretched legs on her knees. This close, she could smell something like damp stone on him in addition to the sweat and smoke, as though he’d been underground.

 

“Can you talk?” she asked. He opened his mouth, found nothing forthcoming to say. He closed it again. Looked at her apologetically. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She pulled a rag from her pile and held it up so he could see it. “I’m going to start washing your face, alright? We can go as slow as you need, but I have to take care of you.” She hesitated, but pushed her point. “All of you.”

 

His face made a complicated expression in the lamplight as he struggled with accepting how much help he needed and what he was willing to endure to get it. She didn’t deserve to see him like this—her hero, broken and bloody and ashamed, but she was he only person he trusted with his entire being. Even if that entire being was laid to waste, it was all he had to give and it would always be hers. He tuned in to the persistent rhythm of his one beating heart against his ears. Cla-ra. Cla-ra. Cla-ra. It soothed him, reminded him. He would let her do whatever she felt she needed to, always. And if she couldn’t look at him after seeing him reduced to the small, quivering thing he was, he understood.

 

Clara watched his internal struggle, keeping her face carefully controlled to hide how much it hurt to guess what he was thinking. Didn’t he know by now? She knew him. All of him. And what’s more, she wanted to take care of him—to put him back together and hold him that way as long as he needed, if he’d let her. When he finally closed his eyes in assent, she let out a breath she hadn’t been entirely conscious of holding. “Daft old man,” she said fondly, and kissed his forehead lightly.

 

The rag, as light and cool as it was, hurt at first as Clara used it to gently wipe the blood and dirt and dried tears from his cheeks, but the more she worked, the more soothing it became. She used one hand to wipe the evidence of the experiments off of him, and kept the other threaded through the curls at the nape of his neck, scratching his scalp gently and rubbing soothing circles that belied the grief at his condition bubbling just under the surface. He was in no state to try and link their minds even with the physical contact, but he could feel it anyway. He’d caused that, he thought. The anguish he felt in her mind was for him, and he didn’t deserve it.

 

“Hey,” she said. The rag paused. “Look at me.” He opened his eyes again and was surprised when two renegade tears escaped. Clara caught one on the pad of her thumb and brushed it away. “I’m no telepath, but I know you’re blaming yourself for whatever happened to you, and you have to stop. For me, if not for yourself.”

 

He touched the side of her thigh in acknowledgment, and she resumed cleaning the particularly deep gash along his jaw. She talked to him while she worked, a mixture of epithets he’d never heard her use and several attempts at small stories about her students at Coal Hill. Clara knew she was babbling, but she was unwilling to let the silence of his trauma get to her and so she held it at bay with whatever she thought would be calm to him.

 

The Doctor let his mind sink into her voice, seeking the balance between rest and unconsciousness as she expertly and painlessly applied the biostitches to the cut, chasing it with some of the cream and gently smearing more over the burn prominent on the right side of his face. The goop soothed and numbed his skin, working deep into his nerves and seeking to nudge them back into commission with the least amount of fuss. Her cool hands applied it next to his devastated throat—at the memory of its near-collapse, he pulled away involuntarily and had to let her soothe and encourage him softly back into letting her heal him. Her left hand left the back of his neck and he missed the contact immediately; he opened his eyes to find her staring at him, her hand resting lightly on the first button of his shirt. A few seconds passed as he worked himself back through the conclusion he had already come to, and when he reached it again he nodded stoically and looked straight ahead as she resumed speaking and began to gently work the remaining buttons open and unstick the shirt from his skin.

 

Clara sucked in a breath as she tugged the rags away to reveal more marks than she thought possible for someone to have on one body. Her eyes were drawn first to angry red lines the sides of him, fading into the bruises of the ribs that were the most obviously broken. “You were whipped,” she said helplessly. He nodded, eyes closed. She traced the lightest touch over a small cluster of blackened pinpoints. “And electrocuted.”

 

He groped for words again and was surprised to come up with a fistful. He offered them to her, as he offered everything. “Experiment number six.” Clara’s face was momentarily unreadable. He blinked in surprise as she leaned forward a moment later and buried her face in his shoulder. It hurt, but no more than anything else. He felt her eyelashes flutter against the side of his neck, but when she pulled away her eyes were dry.

 

He did his best to help her peel the tattered shirt off of him, but she did most of the work. He felt self-conscious, then, sitting before her with even less of his dignity than he’d managed to arrive with. And it was only going to get worse. Clara dabbed at a collarbone and resumed reassuring him that he was okay, she would take care of him, and for the most part she managed to keep the tremors out of her voice. Slowly, the throbbing in his ears lessened, the taut coil of his muscles began to lose some of their strain. She moved the rag in small circles over his chest, an upper arm, and she paused at an elbow to repress a sob when she saw the raw, angry mess the manacles had made of his fine-boned wrists.

 

“What did they do to you?” she whispered, but it was rhetorical. The thought of him, chained and helpless and fighting against his captors even as more and more of his strength ebbed from his wounds to stain his skin, his clothes…this time it was his hesitant, trembling thumb on her cheek, catching the tear that had tumbled down, unbidden. She reached up and steadied his hand with hers, careful to avoid the broken finger and the burn across the back of it.

 

“You aren’t the carer right now,” It was intended as something light, but the hitch in her voice gave her away.

 

The Doctor bridged the gap between them as carefully as he dared and touched his forehead to hers. He concentrated on holding back all of the wayward sparks of agony spitting from his frayed nerves and projected to her a kind of shaky warmth; his gratitude, intermingled with his persistent shame and a vast sorrow to have come to her as broken as he was, as tenuously tethered to life.

 

Clara lifted her head just slightly to touch his nose with hers, and then pulled away and scrubbed at her eyes. “We’re not worrying about me,” she said aloud, and resumed tending to what was so far the nastiest of his wounds—a gash that stretched like a smile from the base of his ribs around to a bruised hipbone. “Worrying is for healthy people,” she added gently. “And right now that’s just me.”

 

The last part of her words didn’t reach The Doctor; the moment her hand brushed the skin near the waistband of his trousers, his mind scrabbled away into the protective haze he’d come to rely on during the worst of his days in the chambers. Things were soft there, slow and muted. Soupy. He knew distantly that he should be worried about the retreat—this was Clara, this was safety— but the significance of the term eluded him and so he settled deeper into the sense of nothing and slipped neatly over the edge of consciousness.

 

Clara felt his mangled hand go slack in hers an instant before she realized that the only breath she heard was her own. “Oh no,” she breathed. “Oh no no no. Doctor? Doctor!” She felt the blood roar in her ears as panic seized her; she dropped the rag and took his face in both of her hands. She was flush against him now, touching everywhere she dared and calling for a response. “Don’t you die on me,” she choked. “Open your eyes, Doctor. Stay with me.” She turned frantically to the equipment the TARDIS had provided her and lunged for the scanner to activate it with violently trembling hands.

 

The readout hummed and glowed orange for a moment, and then words and diagrams began to appear. “I don’t know what this means,” she half sobbed. “Tell me what I need to do.” She looked up at the door of the TARDIS behind his limp body. Her jaw set. “Help him.” For a moment, nothing happened. Then the scanner in her hand went dark. It flickered back to life almost immediately, and now there were only two images: his two hearts, one fluttering a feeble green, and another small device. She recognized it immediately and scooped it from the pile. The scanner display superimposed the two images so that the tip of the holographic device rested against the dim heart. She set the scanner down and turned the second, conical device so that the slim end rested against the skin over his right heart. There was no way to know how many regenerations he’d been given on Trenzalore, no way of knowing if he would regenerate or simply die on the floor of her dimly lit flat. She cupped his still cheek with her other hand.

 

“I will not let that happen,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded stronger than she felt. In her hand, the tip of the dark shape began to glow. She worried briefly that it might work like a defibrillator and send her flying across the room, but something told her that this was a science infinitely more complex and, she hoped, gentle. “Come on,” she whispered, burrowing her fingers in his hair. “Come back to me.” The device began to glow a bright blue against his chest, and Clara leaned forward and pressed her lips softly against his, eyes shut tight and fingers desperate against his neck. All of you, she thought. I want all of you. Come back.

 

The Doctor felt himself hurtled back to life as though he’d been slammed back into his body; for one brief, shining moment, his thoughts were clear and he felt grounded, normal. Almost instantly the pain came crashing back, but it was different this time. It was still unbearable, but it was…distributed, somehow. He opened his eyes to find Clara’s centimeters away, wide and unsure. His mouth felt strange.

 

“Clara?” He was alarmed when her face crumpled, and then her hands were on either side of his face and she was kissing him, and oh. That was why his mouth felt weird. He didn’t know what to do or how to return it, but he didn’t pull away. It lasted only a moment, and he worked on pulling air back into his protesting lungs when she let go and rested her head against his newly-repaired collarbone, shuddering against him with repressed sobs and nearly slack with relief at the double heartbeat threading back to life in his chest. His cheek was wet with her tears, and he raised his arm to rest across her shoulders.

 

Inside, he felt the stirrings of his accelerated healing. How strange, he thought distantly, to know that in time there would be no physical trace of what he’d gone through. He felt raw, sandblasted. Awake. “Clara,” he said again, more strongly this time. She turned her cheek to look up at him. He didn’t know what he was asking as he searched her open face, but he hoped she understood all the same.

 

She kept a hand on the center of his chest, drawing comfort from the echo against her palm. “I nearly lost you,” she said.

 

He tried for a smile. “Not a chance in your hands, my clever girl.”

 

“Flattery,” she said as she picked up the washcloth and coerced his arm up, “will not save you, Mister. I am going to clean and fix up every inch of you that I can see—“ she scrubbed determinedly at a stubborn streak of dried blood, tightening her grip when his hand twitched— “and then I am going to haul your battered carcass to my bed and fix up the rest.”

 

She glared at him, and his mouth went dry. “Yes boss,” he managed.

 

She softened slightly and continued to minister to his burns and bruises, rubbing the pain further and further away with every knead of the cream. He shuddered when the cold rag touched his stomach, but sat obediently still and let her work. Her tears had dried; she was back in charge of herself and of him. Always him. All of him, for as long as she wanted it. This time, when her fingers brushed his hipbone, he seized control of his mental faculties and forced himself to focus on his breathing. He took stock of all of his pain, all of his fear, and he harnessed it, used it to tether himself to reality. When his vision expanded outward again, Clara was perfectly still, fingers on his waistband, watching him silently. He reached out tentatively through their skin on skin contact and found a resounding, infinite affection waiting for him in her mind. She’d been expecting him. Whatever had happened, they would deal with it together. She rubbed the cream into the purpling skin she could see and then shifted her stance so that she was resting on her knees, between his legs.

 

“Ready?”

 

He huffed, smiled wanly. “For you.”

 

Clara took gripped his healing arms under the elbows and levered her weight backwards to lift him. The lacerations across his back shrieked in protest, but he managed to pull away from the TARDIS door and shift his weight onto his legs. His left ankle buckled and they both nearly went down, but Clara threw back a leg and hauled him up until he could figure out the best way to stand. They finally made it and stood breathing hard, holding onto each other. His sweaty head rested wearily on her shoulder, but she felt his triumph through the aching.

 

“Okay?” she asked.

 

His curls tickled her neck as he shifted and took her hand in his to lay it hesitantly on his belt buckle. His hand returned to her shoulder, and he waited, braced. Clara moved as quickly as she dared, coaxing the tattered garments from his ruined buttocks, his mottled hips and thighs. He helped her as best he could, stepping out of them when they finally touched the floor. Clara tugged him to the bed and he collapsed face first into her sheets and soft pillows. He inhaled slowly as she began to work on the angry welts and weeping cuts on his back; she reached for his hand and held it as her other one dabbed and rubbed and massaged.

 

She cleaned the blood from his legs, soothed the bruising on his hips and the insides of his thighs. She tried not to think, tried harder to keep the despair and anger inside her from making her too rough or causing him to think it was directed at him. He was her best friend, and he had been broken, and she would put him back together again. For now, it was that simple. It had to be. The rest could wait.

 

The Doctor closed his eyes, focused on the feeling of her hand wrapped around his and the scent of her pillows, and gave himself up to her care. To her love.

 

It was nearly three in the morning when Clara finally ran out of wounds to soothe. Fractures and breaks had been set, torn muscles prompted back into shape, angry wounds stitched quiet and flat. The Doctor had long since been lulled into a half-sleep, and he looked like the world’s most pathetic kitten with his poofy hair and his mouth slightly open. As the first part of him to receive care, his face was already looking recognizable and softer. The stitches on his jaw had nearly completely joined with his surrounding skin, and the bruising on his throat had turned something closer to yellow.

 

Clara yawned and stepped away into her bathroom to wash her hands and change her pyjamas. She rummaged through her dresser drawers once she was back in her room and came up with the baby-soft t-shirt she’d gotten him several months ago at a rummage sale. It was light blue and said “trust me, I’m a doctor” in bold type. She’d thought it was funny then, and frankly, she still did. A little more rooting produced an oversized pair of sweats that would probably be too short for him, but were comically long on her. She roused him mumbling and sleepy and got the pants pulled over his hips and the shirt rolled gently down his chest, and she dropped a fond kiss on his nose. He said something incomprehensible and started snoring gently a second later.

 

Clara shot a text message to the school, trusting that her impeccable attendance and punctuality would carry her through any potential fallout of missing a day. It wasn’t something she usually had to worry about, but she wouldn’t be hauling them to the vortex anytime soon, so she thought it best to stay on the safe side. She shook her head at the gangly figure taking up her entire bed and resolved to throw her now-bloodstained sheets—and her rather less bloodstained time lord—into the wash first thing when they woke up. She wiggled a blanket and a pillow out from under him and carted them to the couch, turning off the lamp as she left the room. She was asleep as soon as she stilled, and she did not dream.


	2. Prelude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clara wakes up to a normal day with a recovering and infuriatingly mobile Doctor in her flat-- what passes for normal for them, anyway. There is a very good reason that it takes an hour for her to remember why this in itself is all wrong.

Clara awoke to the sound of the Doctor's head against her kitchen cabinet. Right, she recalled after a groggy moment of confusion. Grievously injured hyperactive alien in her room overnight. She wondered what she'd slept through up until now. She hoped he'd left the poor blender alone this time. Honestly, she couldn't leave him unsupervised for a minute.

Right on cue: a sound like so many potatoes hitting the floor. 

It occurred to her idly as she pulled herself off the couch to survey the damage that aural injury identification was a skill she wasn't entirely comfortable having-- but neither was temporal domesticity and here they were. She padded into the kitchen, sighed, and searched for the least bruised bit of bare arm to nudge with her foot. The Doctor scrambled back to his feet before she could reach him and leaned casually against the refrigerator, grinning cheerfully as blood from a popped stitch trickled down past his ear.

"Tea?" he chirped. His voice was too high and still hoarse in his mottled throat. His hand groped behind him, caught, and then he was brandishing her empty kettle with fingers that didn't seem entirely inclined to grip the handle. 

She plucked it from his hand and replaced it with a mostly clean dish rag she first swiped under the cold tap. The Doctor stuck it to his head with a wet smack. A well oiled machine, they were. Clara portioned the leaves into their little metal basket and then stepped back for a good look at him in the mid morning light. He looked everywhere but at her, rubbing at the residual blue healing goo stuck to his elbow and pressing as much into the corner of the cabinets as he could. He was still a bit banged up, but he'd do. "Don't worry" she said. "I'm not going to touch you if I don't have to." He relaxed marginally. She turned to fetch her mobile. "But I will have to touch you for a wash," she continued. "You're not getting space goo and blood all over my flat." He re-tensed, face inscrutable.

"Stop picking," she called as she knelt behind the couch to unplug her phone. She'd slept later than she meant. "We'll get you into the shower later." She rummaged for the sugar cubes in the pantry, rattled the box. 

"Get _me_ into the shower?" His eyebrows were scraping his hairline, brain having moved on from the touching in favor of a jibe. "Clara, have you seen yourself?"

"I look fantastic," she said, shaking her sleep-mussed hair, "and you're not getting out of it."

He rolled his eyes, or maybe his eyes just rolled. He was still pale enough that it was hard to tell. "I know better," he grumbled, hand pressed to his brow. 

"Good," Clara said. She shooed him forward, rested another cold rag on his neck.

He tried to hoist himself up on the cabinet, played nonchalant when his weight bearing arm gave out. "I was thinking," he said. "About the shower. You have an incomprehensibly enormous washing machine--" he paused, face contorted in thought. "Is that a thing, d'you think?" he asked. "Do people with big egos have big washing machines?"

"Hang on," Clara said, putting a hand up. "How did you turn a conversation about a shower into one about my ego?" 

"I'm sorry, should I have let you do it?"

She stared him down and took a half step forward. He backed up against the counter, eyes wide. "Mine's bigger," he managed. Clara's eyebrow raised. "My washing machine," he elaborated. "But it's in the TARDIS and well, yours isn't." He fled to the other side of the kitchen when she opened the cabinet beside him and began rummaging for mugs, hand going for his jacket lining before remembering he wasn't wearing it. 

He settled for fidgeting with a spoon he pulled from his pyjama pocket and continued. "I could just hop in the wash with the clothes, maybe adjust some of the bearings first, we'd have cleaned two birds with one machine and saved an entire showerful of water, just like that." He tried to snap his fingers, frowning when they brushed past each other with just a rasp.

Clara sighed as he kept trying. Rasp. Frown. Rasp. "We've been over this, Doctor. No Time Lords in the wash ever again." She popped the toaster panel open to fiddle with the audio cable as the water heated. 

"But now I know how long--"

"Ever. And stop with the fingers. You'll catch fire."

His eyebrows shifted to default sulk mode. "Don't blame me when you humans run out of clean water. You're already on thin ice." She didn't reply. He eyed her for a moment, and then said, conversationally, "What are you doing to your toaster?"

"Hmm? Oh." Clara gestured to its innards. "There's a song stuck in my head. Best way to get it out is to hear it."

"You've got a mobile."

She wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, but this way's more fun."

He nodded, folded his arms. His wrist pressed against a cracked rib. He unfolded them. "And ah," he shifted ever so slightly closer, looking down over her shoulder and pointing. "Where did you learn to do that?"

"What, swap the psychic input from you to me? Psh." Clara snapped the edge of the toaster shut and made a triumphant sound as it began playing a Beegees song. She grinned brightly up at him. "All I had to do was move a few wires. Really, I don't think half the things you do are as hard as you make them sound."

The Doctor blinked incredulously, but Clara had already turned away. "Biscuits or toast?" she asked. 

"Clara, I'm not--"

"Toast," she decided. "I'm out of the biscuits you like. Unless you've got some stored in the TARDIS." He made a funny sound. "Let me guess--" She popped two pieces of bread into the toaster, which was now cheerfully piping out what was unmistakably a dubstep remix of the P-P-P-Penguin advert-- "you lost them in a weird space-time pocket on the other side of the universe."

"No, they're stashed under the console. But the TARDIS isn't letting me in."

"Probably because you need a wash."

He scowled at her back, adjusted the frequency of his spoon with the extraneous wires he'd liberated from her alarm clock earlier. "It's standard protocol for telepathic distress flying," he said. 

Clara kept her eyes on the warming toast, hands still. "Oh?" she asked lightly. She was just fine with carrying on getting cross with him for a bloodstained floor and an extra slew of uncoordinated-limb-related incidents, thank you. 

He skipped neatly over any clarification. "Don't worry," he said, pointing the spoon dramatically at the tea kettle. "She'll let me back in in a few hours. She just likes to fuss." The kettle began abruptly to scream. "Oh look," he said, trying to slip the spoon into the jacket he was still not wearing. "Water's ready."

He picked up the teapot and promptly sloshed most of the water out onto the cabinet. Clara was careful to avoid his fingers as she snatched it out of his hand and pointed to the table. "Sit."

Neither of them commented on the sound his near-immediate collapse elicited from the chair, but it didn't escape Clara's notice. Tea and toast first, she told herself. She wasn't sure yet how she was going to get him to comply without breaking something attached to him, but this routine and its inevitable end were familiar, and she could be patient.  
*************

When the Doctor pulled his mind back from an internal montage of Annie DiFranco music videos and patched-together memories of his last few days, Clara was sitting across from him and frowning at the partial piece of toast in her hand. He blinked to clear his fuzzy vision and peered at the toast in an attempt to ascertain the problem. Then he checked his own. 

"Something's wrong about it," Clara said.

The Doctor took a tentative nibble of his, contemplated. "S'normal to me." He reached across and took hers, careful to avoid her fingers.

"Oi!" 

"Calm down Clara, just checking for rookie mistakes. I know how difficult toast can be for you."

Her eyes narrowed. "I'm perfectly calm," she said as she took his plate. 

He ignored her and sniffed the bread before taking a small bite. He shrugged. "Well this was definitely the one closest to the psychic interception patch, but it's still just toast." 

"You can taste that how, exactly?"

He waved a hand. "Alien tech always leaves traces on primitive human technology." Clara made a mental note to throw something at him when he didn't look like a wadded up cardigan might actually kill him. 

She took a bite of the toast from his plate; it tasted mostly normal so she ate the rest. Twice, she caught her leg trying to match the Doctor's pace as it bounced under the table, but mostly it was their usual brand of domestic-- him looking everywhere but at her and both of them varying in degrees of blood-and-goo stained. 

She counted it a win that everyone's genetic makeup was untampered with, frankly. That had been an exhausting two months. 

Clara watched the Doctor nibble his toast and sip at his tea. Maybe the lack of appetite was a side effect of healing. Maybe it was a side effect of-- her mind slipped around the corner of that vague thought. Hopefully it was the healing. It was almost certainly the other thing, the dodgy thing that she couldn't recall at just this moment. She ate her toast. If The Doctor had noticed her scrutinizing him, he was wise enough not to let on. 

"So you're stuck here until tonight at the earliest," she said when he'd eaten all he was probably going to.

"Yep."

"In my flat."

"Looks that way." He leaned forward, the excitement in his eyes pushing for a place beside the effort of staying grounded. "Though if it really bothers you," he said conspirationally, "I've always wanted to camp out at a Tesco." 

"No," Clara said. "I'm not unleashing you half dead on the streets."

He sat back, pulled a fidget spinner out of his pocket. "I guess you're stuck with me then."

"Where did you even-- no. Never mind. Look. You can stay, but..." she ran a critical eye over his matted hair standing in every direction, the wet spot where he'd chewed his collar, his skin still streaked faintly with dried blood and blue stuff. "The shower is not optional," she finished.

For a long, tense moment they just stared at each other. The control freak and the man who should never be controlled, indeed. Clara broke first, with only the dimmest of realizations that this was new. "Why are you being stubborn about this?" she asked. "You like it when I take care of you." His gaze dropped. Sensing the end, Clara applied gentle pressure. "We'll go as slow as you need, Doctor. You don't have to worry."

He moved his half-eaten toast around with a finger. When he finally spoke, his hoarse voice was unexpectedly glib. "Tell me the twelfth number in the sequence of happy primes."

"One hundred and ninety-three," Clara said immediately. "Why?"

He rubbed a slow thumb over a half-healed burn on his other hand. "Where did you learn that?"

Clara frowned. "Dunno," she said. "Must've been something I picked up from Danny. It was just there."

The Doctor nodded. "Like the configuration of your toaster," he said, "or the way that you haven't been able to sit still since you woke up, or the way that you could taste the effects of psychic tampering on a piece of toast." He sat back in his chair, no longer smiling, and for the first time all morning, Clara truly glimpsed how small and fragile he looked in one layer of clothes.

She leaned forward, curious. "What are you saying?" 

Unexpectedly, a weary, scornful expression came over him, the one that hadn't been directed at Clara since he was a fresh and raw nerve in his new body. "Come on Clara." The Doctor gestured dismissively with a shaky hand. She felt herself begin to bristle in spite of herself as his voice rose with every sentence. "Put it together. Use your hilariously tiny brain and solve the problem."

He wanted her angry, but that didn't stop her from getting there. She hadn't realized how frayed she felt. She was exhausted, confused, and more than a little frustrated. There was something else there too, faint and hard to pin dwn. She stood and braced her hands on the table, leaning forward until he was visibly uncomfortable, but he didn't look away. 

"Alright, Doctor," she said. "Let's walk through this. You show up at my flat in the middle of a school night, with the hell beaten out of you, centimeters from regenerating--" his fingers curled slightly inward, but Clara didn't relent. He'd deliberately provoked this and right now she didn't care about the odd moods he'd cycled through this morning because fuck him for putting her completely in over her head last night, fuck this entire situation, and fuck that pitiful look on his face-- "and I spend the next few hours babbling like a soppy idiot to try and keep you calm and alive," she continued, "and then I wake up doing my best to set whatever all of that was aside so we can pretend this is normal but no, I start thinking like you. Like your thoughts are in my head. I don't even know if I am processing any of what I did or saw last night correctly because apparently, I'm sharing a brain with the lord of emotional repression, and--" she broke off. "I'm not processing any of this correctly." She was breathing hard now, and when she looked up at him, his face was mild and blank. "You," she said.

He looked away now, back at his plate. "Me," he said. "But not on purpose."

Now she felt it, the jolt from a pattern of intrusive thoughts that weren't hers giving way to her own rhythm and god, her mind had not been her own. Now that the overlap had been interrupted, she could feel the influence of him all around, looking for cracks in her sense of self. His essence felt paradoxically benign, almost lost as it lapped against her thoughts, like it was looking for a place to recontain itself and rest. It had probably crept in while she'd been sleeping. She pushed it away, easy now that she knew what she was looking for. 

With the tranquil, slow tint of his thoughts removed, the enormity of everything that had happened the previous night began to creak against her ability to stay calm.  
"You died," she stated, and the cracks in her bravado began to show in her voice.

"Clearly not," said the Doctor, raising his hands and grinning as he shook them, jovial once more. Staring at the red bracelets still lashed around his wrists, Clara suddenly understood why everything had been calm up until this point.

"You're in shock," she said. 

"Yes!" he cried, pointing at her proudly with that triumphant smile. "I am in shock. I knew you'd get there." His fingers drummed on the table in excitement. 

The sudden, giddy urge to smash his hand with a large book like a cartoon spider was only mitigated by the cuts and bruises traveling up his arms in various shades of healing.  
Clara pulled herself together, tried for the factual and confident voice she reserved for preadolescents and sentient extraterrestrial irritants. "We were in shock because you...hijacked my brain or something," she continued, slightly more steady.

"Not on purpose," he repeated. He fished a marble from his pocket and began batting it between his hands like a cat. "Clara," he said to the glass ball, "Do you have any idea how much energy I expend trying to quiet your thoughts? It is exhausting, and I still get surprised but particularly loud opinions. I'm doing all of the suppression for the both of us and I have never purposefully invaded your mind."

"So what?" she snapped. "You woke up this morning and suddenly couldn't control it?" His fingers stopped. The marble bounced pathetically off of one of his hands and ambled off the edge of the table with a sound like a gunshot. Clara looked like she'd been hit between the eyes. "You can't control it," she repeated. "They got in your head."  
"Friendly fire," he agreed. His mouth quirked. "That was why they let me go, after all." Clara felt cold all over. She hadn't yet considered how he'd managed to get away to the TARDIS. How had she not considered that? 

His hoarse voice took on a mockery of a Tom Cruise accent. "Mission accomplished." 

"Don't you quote a stupid spy movie at me, Doctor." Clara was beginning to feel distinctly ill. "Don't you dare." 

He tilted his head, blue eyes scrutinizing her face. "I tried to stop them," he said defensively. He began turning the mug round and round by its handle. "I lasted more than a week, I think." 

"Because you lost track of time after the fifth day," she said faintly, recalling the glimpses of torture she'd crammed out of the way the previous night in order to focus on the injuries actively trying to kill him. He really couldn't control it.

Her arms were trembling now. Recalling traumatic events dumped into your head without warning did that to people, she was pretty sure. Really, it brought her some comfort to be reacting appropriately again. Except.

"Clara--" the Doctor's voice was urgent, his face suddenly closer to hers than she knew he was comfortable with at the moment. And that was the point of what had happened to him, wasn't it? All of his mind, unlocked for the taking. And for what?

"Hush," she said faintly. "I'm fine." She was looking past him. "I just need--give me just a moment." Clara moved quickly around the table, and then she was running full tilt down the hall. She stumbled into the bathroom just in time to collapse and throw up into the toilet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope the tonal shift didn't throw you off too badly!


	3. Steal Your Pain Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clara's mind is her own once more, and so logically the first thing she does is bite off more than she can chew and call it good. Self sacrifice was never her color but she thinks she could get used to it.

When Clara returned to the kitchen, it was to find the dishes in the sink, a fresh cup of tea at her spot on the table, and the Doctor nowhere. She glanced at the front door, then checked the washing machine. Just in case. 

She found him in her room, every light turned up as bright as it could go and her clock radio tuned to static. A controlled recreation of his environment, made just slightly different to keep the panic away. Still, Clara’s skin prickled. He sat in the middle of her room, hands on his knees and his eyes closed. The sixth sense of his mind rubbed against hers, seeking again a place to settle. She pushed it away gently, like blowing away a soap bubble, and really looked at him. 

He was made of angles; they were in his knuckles, the bends of his elbows, the lines on his face, and every one of them bore some kind of mark. His hands were the hardest to look at. Their elegance was still visible beneath the bruising and angry marks, but that somehow made it worse. Had she checked to see if any of them were broken? Would he have told her if they were?

He spoke without opening his eyes. "You shouldn't worry," he said. "My regenerative abilities are a bit knackered, but they're recovering."

He couldn't help but hear her emotional thoughts on a good day, he'd said. What could he hear now? Clara knelt before him, near enough to see his pulse in his neck but far enough away to keep him comfortable. "And you?" 

His eyes fluttered open, the right one still bloodshot and swollen beneath. He looked uncertainly at her, and then reached for her hand, hovering over it and glancing at her for permission. Touch telepath. Clara swallowed, then nodded almost imperceptibly and didn't dare breathe as his trembling fingers came to rest slowly on her palm, eyes locked on hers. 

Clara was prepared this time and it still was almost not enough. She could see everything, or everything was there to be seen-- there was a huge difference between having the option to look and the looking itself. 

She understood immediately what he meant about catching her most emotional thoughts. His were practically at her feet, tangled and writhing and hard to perceive directly. 

Like he had been, convulsing on the floor of that sterile room from shock after shock. A voice that Clara had no context for: "Do you know how much electricity we're having to generate for this? It's honestly...shocking." Clara jumped back from the tangled mass, seeking distance. She knew even as she moved away that there had been transference. She felt new memories weigh her down, half impression and half real, as though she'd been told the details and left to illustrate them herself. She'd gotten too close. 

She felt him pull slightly, but something held her to the spot. If she was going to find a way to help him, she needed to know what, exactly, she was dealing with. Her other hand moved to grip his between them-- a lifeline.

As an English teacher, Clara had utilized her fair share of metaphors. In the face of this strange sixth sense, however, she found words lacking entirely. 

She wasn't looking at it, because her eyes were closed (when had that happened?). 

It made no sound, and yet it cried out ceaselessly in his ragged, broken voice. 

Everything was screaming for Clara to get away, but she held her ground. She would not let him carry this alone.  
She didn't realize that she hadn't been breathing until the Doctor pulled his hand away, decisively this time. The room swam back into focus as Clara gasped air into aching lungs and collapsed fully into sitting. She touched her cheek and found it damp, felt her stomach flip once, threateningly. Her head pounding, she caught her breath and looked back up at him. 

Whatever she was going to say died in her throat at the sight of him. He was trembling all over now, the expression on his face pained, eyes screwed shut. _Oh, Oswald you sodding fool._ Obviously he wasn't just pulling back for her sake. "I'm sorry," she said, hands hovering but not landing. "I didn't think--are you alright?" 

"I needed to see if I could hold it," he said. His voice was ragged. "I can't have what happened...it has to stay in with me until I can fix it." His eyes opened, pleading. "Did I do it? Did I hide it?" 

Right there and then, Clara made her choice. Even as the new memories settled in her mind and began to fill in the gaps left by the previous night, Clara resolved that she would use this terrible knowledge to help him. As his best friend, it was her duty. Who else was there? And if it gave her nightmares or made her sick, she would damn well keep it to herself. She'd known the risks. She could not make this about her. 

Her voice was strong, unwavering. "Yes."

He took another deep breath and let it out slowly. "My defenses will rebuild in time," he said, "and I will deal the way I always have." His face worked to give up his next words. "But I couldn't bear if it got in your head too."

Clara touched his wrist. The twisting, writhing knot was still there, but it had nothing new to tell her. Its thorns were empty. She let go, grimly satisfied.

"I can only stop it from seeking you out," he said. "If we're going to do the touching, you can't go looking for it, because I won't be able to stop you." He swallowed. Was he ashamed? Nothing about this was his fault. Did he know that?

Clara took in the sight of him, this destroyer and savior of worlds, this champion of the galaxy and last of his kind. Strip all of that away, and a frightened and bruised boy was left to stare up at her with those ageless, trusting eyes. 

She reached out and threaded a hand through his matted hair. He flinched, but closed his eyes and leaned back into her palm. She stroked his cheek with a thumb, marveling at the sheer vitality in him. He seemed boundless, even now. "You just have to tell me how to help," she said, and tried not to mix up her smile with helplessness.

He breathed twice. Had he somehow felt that a transfer had occurred? There was no way to know how much he was receiving right now. Clara held her breath. Finally, he said in a small voice, "I'm cold." 

She struggled to keep the relief out of his reach. "Come on," she said, standing and offering her hands. "Now we know we can do this." 

He took her hands with a smile, and there was the tangle again. Clara ignored it and pulled him stiffly to his feet. He probably didn't need to lean on her, but he could and that was all that seemed to matter. She liked being the one to hold him up, and he had been denying himself the opportunity all morning. She could feel his mood improving, felt the atmosphere of him change inside. She frowned. "Are all of those adverts always playing in your head?" she asked. "Because that explains a lot." He huffed a laugh, and it was beautiful the way all of his features moved to create it. 

*******************

Yes. Clara would do a lot to bring that expression out of him. But as she turned on the shower water to let it heat and coaxed him out of his clothes with the gentlest of touches, she resolved that there was nothing at all she wouldn't do to protect it. 

Nothing, she thought when pulling the shower curtain closed had brought the bath to a half-familiar dimness and she'd reopened them at the same moment his whole body tensed.

Nothing, she thought when his half-healed wounds lay before her like a map of a neighborhood she'd forgotten she knew.

Nothing, she thought when every place she touched screamed differently in the back of her mind.

Nothing, she thought as she steadied herself under his trauma, determined to understand it even if she couldn't resolve it for him. He would not go through this alone. 

******************

“I haven’t got anything else in your size,” Clara said, pawing through her drawers with a frown. 

The Doctor, freshly washed and still faintly pink, paused scrubbing his hair with a towel and replied, “You can’t say that—you haven’t checked your closet. There’s a whole world of clothes in there.”

She waved a hand and kept digging, overturning pajamas that would be comically short on him, small shorts that would do nothing to cover him, camisol, camisol…she turned to check the storage box she kept under her bed and froze, blinking twice before her thoughts assembled.

The Doctor tugged down the sundress he was wearing in an attempt to maneuver the hem of it a bit lower, but gave up and settled with swishing it all around his knobby knees like a six year old. It was pale yellow, and the longest dress Clara owned, and it was so jarring against the dark attire that he normally wore that it actually made him look smaller.

“Date night?” Clara asked casually.

He shrugged. “S’loose,” he said. “Don’t really feel like trousers for a bit.” 

Clara closed her eyes and hoped that it looked like exasperation and not an attempt to beat back the sudden pain as her chest clenched with that helpless, tight feeling. “Not your color,” she said with a false cheer, “but it’s doing some very illegal things to your eyes.”

While he pondered that in the mirror, Clara slipped shakily into a fresh set of pyjamas. By the time she turned to move the towels to the washroom, she’d mostly recovered. He was standing with a hand splayed against the door of his TARDIS, staring contemplatively up at the words across the top. She felt the unease in the atmosphere around her mind. Being without his ship was about as anxious as he got.

“Just a few more hours,” he said, and his teeth flashed in a grin. Clara was reminded suddenly of a piece of trivia she’d picked up in her studies at university: most animals, humans (usually) excepted, smiled as a display of fear. She shoved the small mountain of damp towels at him and steered him from the room. 

“Put them in the wash,” she called after him. “And get Netflix ready!”

She turned back to her bed and began stripping the sheets and the duvet. Twice, she had to stop and take a deep breath to steady her stomach when the blood and healing goo overwhelmed her with despair. Knowing he was alive and in the next room helped, but it wasn’t his proximity to death that squeezed her chest and made her head light. It was how far they had gone to break him, what they had done to her best friend in the name of their petty squabble with another planet. As old friends with the governor of said planet, the enemies assumed he knew secrets of the terrain and inner workings of its capital. 

He hadn’t set foot on that planet in centuries, but that didn’t matter. They had hurt and humiliated him for intel that probably hadn’t even helped them in the end, and then dumped him on the surface to die once they were through, and the cruelty gnawed incessantly at her heart and stole her breath away.

By the time she started the wash and joined the Doctor on the couch, her breathing was back to normal and the searing fury reduced back to hot coals. He was wrapped up to his chin with the spare blanket from the hall closet, knees drawn up to his chest and his bare feet peeking from the bottom. She flipped on something to babble in the background and then nudged his arm open until she fit under the blanket with him. He wisely did not complain when arranging the edge to fit under her chin left one of his shoulders exposed to the air. 

And this was almost normal, wasn’t it? It felt very slightly like a parody, sitting together in apparent relaxation while the memories of atrocities thrashed beneath the surface of them both to the soundtrack of Deep Space Nine, but everyone was in one piece and the bowl of sweets she’d swiped from the kitchen balanced on their thighs under the blanket for occasional pilfering, and all of that summed up to “normal.” And if she had to remain wholly focused on his movements so that every twitch didn’t startle her into memories that weren’t hers, if that kept that big old face of his soft and content…well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last time I updated, I had 85% of part three done. I have 0% of part 4 on paper right now but I know where it's heading, so bear with me.


End file.
